Chapter Text
That summer, we were seventeen years old. We watched as the waves murky with sand enveloped our feet, our guffaws melting together whilst we’d been planted squarely there like twin shrubs. That season was the second in which we’d been to the Walker's vacation home, enduring the warmer months nearest where the sun shone through her hair over the golden coastlines of Essex as she gradually disappeared over the cerulean northern sea. The sight was ever so enthralling to do so much as dull the sharpness in my mother’s tone as she beckoned Clara and I to return inside posthaste, and the two of us raced each other up the wooden steps, nearly tripping over our petticoats just as the ever sharper eye of Mrs. Walker loomed daggers over mother’s shoulder.
For as long as I could remember having known Mrs. Walker and not quite understanding her connections to my mother, she seemed as though she’d been delivered directly from the garden of a great estate—and the Walkers themselves had indeed possessed a garden just outside their estate in Cheshire, a staggering one at that, where Clara and I had snuck out one spring afternoon before her mother could pull us out to town on busying errands. Among the towering hedges and bright buds dotting the cobblestone paths, there in the center of a grand ellipse resided a formidable figure. Stone that seemed to judge as one walked by, picking apart any odd step or loose expression. Mrs. Walker had a gaze just about as cold as the slate granite, but with it, the unfortunate advantage to pull aside my mother and whisper such things as “Helen ought to quit acting the part of a scamp,” as we skittered along, dark circles following my stride in particular like a posh cat whom had just spotted a rat in the kitchen making off with scraps of a banquet. Had I ever truly caught on to the weight of that stare, I’d have been more grateful for the years in which I was none the wiser.
Felix arrived late that night to the enthusiasm of my mother and Mrs. Walker, and the lack of disapproval over his absence for dinner that night stuck as Clara and I had gotten settled into our bedroom that night. I remember the time in which my brother had gone from Felix to Mr. Cartwright; he’d become a gentleman, as were the words of those all around us, far before he had reached his twenties. I was hardly seven when he’d begun to don more manners, more titles, more of everything that seemed to highlight the divide between proper Victorian society and the careless wonder of fantastical youth. Clara and I were certainly next to fall into our roles, but it was as though we had changed in everyone else’s view aside of our own. For the dozens upon hundreds of those in years to come to go walking down the boulevard, turn their heads and wave greeting to Miss Walker, I would be right there to match the pace of Clara. For as close as the two of us were, however, it seemed as though I’d have been on the same page and number as her on that hypothetical city street than I was right next to her under the linen sheets that night, her back turned to me in what might have been sleep, or—far more likely, having looked back at the events that transpired there afterword—concealment.
We were seventeen years old, I already learned there would be another Mrs. Cartwright, following suit of my mother; not me, but rather, the sun that rose with me that very morning I had been told of Felix’s engagement, and subsequently witnessed the unreadable expression on her face, clouded with thoughts I could no longer read.